The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
by Firefly99
Summary: [Giftfic for Cendrillo] Three humans against a Weapon solely to avert an ecological disaster. But, as Cid finds out, it's so hard to fight underwater...


The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

by Firefly99

* * *

A/N: My very good e-friend Cendrillo is now married, and all of us at the Fanfictionpoint7 forum are all so damn happy for her we wrote her giftfics, all starring Cid and a pairing that makes most lesser humans throw up. Anyway, Seventhe tossed around an idea for an awesome yet ridiculouspairing as a joke that I took too seriously, and...well.

So...Happy wedding, Cend!

* * *

The only thing he couldn't drive was a submarine, which was why he was making the kid do it.

Submarines had never interested him. No submarine had wings. The Shinra subs didn't even have glass screens, just tacky radar representations of the world around them drawn out in wire-frames. There was no exhilaration, no clouds to rise through and no waves to skim over and no sky to stare up into. It was like playing a video game, leading a slow submarine through a virtual world.

Cid had to admit that the kid was a quick learner. He was sat in the captain's chair, a grid of lasers crossing his face and detecting every movement made by his eyes, allowing him to survey his surroundings freely though the screen. The SOLDIER reflexes were obviously coming in handy with the super-sensitive trackball beneath his left hand – the barest nudge could send the submarine drifting off course. Occasionally he would play with the controls where his right hand was, firing and reloading torpedoes or changing the zoom on the wire-frame ocean they swum beneath.

He had to admit that the constant whirr of the machinery here set his mind at ease, though. It almost made him forget that this was suicide. It almost stopped him looking at the bloodstains sleek across the steel floor where Cloud had slaughtered three inexperienced men who he had previously almost befriended. He didn't like that part of the kid. It was too brutal, too efficient. At least he'd had the decency to remove the bodies.

He almost wondered what that 'special pose' the three Regulars kept going on about was. Cloud had called them all by name. Perhaps he knew.

"I can see it," Cloud said, his voice even, flat, and expressionless in order to avoid upsetting the _9_'s course. "It's dead ahead."

"Weapon?" came Yuffie's voice, uncharacteristically soft and scared, every blinking light in the whole submarine reflected in her wide eyes. "Don't make me fight it, Cloud. Please don't. Please…"

"I won't," he responded. He sounded almost robotic. "You can't use a shuriken underwater. I can't risk having you out there with me."

"What's the plan, then?" Cid asked. As much as he wanted to shout and swear and cause a ruckus the sub was oppressive and tiny. It was as if the high air pressure had crushed his lungs.

Cloud breathed. The new, emotionless voice bothered Cid. Cloud may have been part of the Shinra machine, but now it sounded like he was one. Perhaps that was how he could be so ruthless so easily. "Vincent, Barret, Yuffie – you can't use your weapons underwater, so you'll all have to stay inside the sub. Red, you can't get that tail of yours wet, and Cait's circuitry isn't designed to withstand complete submergence, so you both have to stay with them. I want you all to provide backup with the torpedoes."

"Who's steering?" Yuffie asked. Cloud's right hand left the controls for a second and touched her shoulder.

"You do it. When you drive, you don't get motion sickness."

"Oh, goodie. So I won't puke, but die when I ram this whole sub into a wall. Thanks a lot, Cloud."

"It's not that hard to steer. You just have to keep calm and focus. And make sure to keep firing and reloading the torpedoes if you get a lock on Weapon."

Cid glanced across at her. It was just as well that the high air pressure in the sub made it impossible to cry – the tears were forced back deep down inside you. It was odd seeing her so openly scared – she was usually full of power and bravado.

Trust him to be the only cheerful one.

"We have to stop Weapon," Vincent said, carefully, "before it attacks its target."

"The Underwater Reactor, right?" Yuffie shook her head. "But we hate the Shinra, don't we? Let's just let Weapon do its job – "

"She, Yuffie," interrupted the cloaked man in the corner.

"What?"

"Weapon is a she."

"Why do I care what it is? If we go up against that thing we're all gonna die. All I'm saying is – why do we care about the Reactor all of a sudden?"

"Think about it, Yuffie," Cloud said, sounding as if he was dead already. "If it destroys the Reactor, all the mako will be released into the ocean."

"And everythin' that lives in the ocean'll die, Yuffie!"

Cid shot Barret a smile. It was nice to see someone acting like themselves, amongst a human-gone-robot and a tough girl-gone-wimp.

"That's the best case scenario," came Vincent's dull tone. "At worst, the mako will mutate everything that lives down there. There are already too many monsters crossing the land thanks to the Shinra's actions, but so far the sea has remained relatively safe. Nothing will be able to live in that sea for hundreds of years, except the monsters – and being surrounded by mako all their lives will only make them worse."

"Normally I'd go for Sephiroth first, because Holy would stop Weapon from needing to exist," Cloud muttered, "but this is too urgent."

"Ok, Cloud," Yuffie smiled. "I'll give it a go. But you owe me a big fat shiny materia afterwards. A really big one. For me to keep for ever and ever."

Cloud improved the contrast on the radar screen – a school of previously invisible wire-frame fish flitted past the giant monitor. Yuffie followed the progress of the leader with her eyes, smiling slightly.

"Hey, Vincent. How do you know Weapon's a she?"

"I read Ilfalna's reports," he sighed. "Weapon is made up of a sort of…sentient materia. The souls of the Ancients are turned into materia, but only female souls become Weapons. Male souls become the materia that we can use in battle."

"What makes a female soul different?"

Vincent glanced at her, then turned to look at Tifa. "Women have the protective instinct – the mother instinct. Just as a mother will fight to the death for her child, so will a Weapon fight to the death for her Planet. A Weapon is made up of the spirits of a million Cetran mothers."

"A million…?"

"Correct. All working as one amalgam."

"Neat-o," Yuffie said, beginning to return to her usual self. "You should become a scientist. You know that?"

"I don't ever plan on that," Vincent replied, tersely.

"Anyway," Cloud continued, "Cid and Tifa are going to come with me – Cid's spear works even underwater, and Tifa's a very strong swimmer."

"Cloud? Aren't you forgetting something?"

It was Tifa, dark brown hair soft around her shoulders as she touched his arm.

"We can't breathe underwater, Cloud. We need suits. Scuba gear. Something like that. What do you have in mind?"

Cid watched as the slightest glint of an arrogant smile appeared on Cloud's laser-crossed face.

"Well, I can produce oxygen with the mako in my blood. But I can only do that for about forty minutes before I faint. I was thinking of sharing my oxygen with you, but that would only give us about twenty minutes to defeat that thing and if something happened to me…"

"So? You're not thinking of going out there alone?"

"No, Tifa. I've already said you and Cid are coming along. I've come up with something."

Cid watched Cloud's fingers run across the keypad, engaging the auto-pilot, before swinging round in his chair and facing the others.

He lifted his sword. A dark purple glint the colour of empty lungs and crushed hopes and oxygen flashed out from one of the materia sockets.

"This is it," he said, smiling broadly. "My little way of cheating. Respiratory materia."

"Where'd you get that?"

"From a black market materia dealer in Kalm. Cost an arm and a leg, but it was worth it." He held it up to one of the ceiling mounted lights – the glow coming though it was like sunlight filtering though water. "You don't get stuff like this in the shops. Too powerful."

"What does it do?" Cid asked. "And how the hell is it any better than an aqualung?"

"This materia," Cloud began, "allows the users to absorb oxygen through their skin. As long as you hold your breath, oxygen will get into your blood and your lungs'll fill up with waste gases. Breathe out, but don't breathe back in. Apparently it's pretty easy to get used to."

"It'll work on all of us?" asked Tifa.

Cloud nodded. "As long as we stay fairly close together and keep concentrating on it, it should be good for all of us at once." He sighed. "But if anyone gets wounded, I want Yuffie to come and pick them up in the sub. I don't want to risk any of us drowning."

"Gotcha," Yuffie said, forcing a smile. "It can't be that hard, can it? It's just like a big metal fish."

Cloud straightened up in the chair and turned off the auto-pilot, changing the focus on the radar.

It seemed vaguely humanoid in shape, but deformed and strange – its massive arms swept backwards from domed shoulders, long, slender fins that might once have been fingers angled sharply outwards, like wings. Its tiny, humanoid head was mostly hidden in a powerful chest, cut away where a ribcage should have been to reveal a huge glowing materia – a heart for a creature that wasn't even alive. The massive stumpy legs were angled to streamline it as it moved through the water. Not a part of it moved – it was as if the Planet itself moved around it.

It was the size of a large building.

"Shit," Cid said, and suddenly the reality of the situation kicked in. This wasn't a monster they could kill without blinking an eyelid. This was a sentient weapon designed to destroy whatever threatened the Planet.

He looked at his hands. He'd always had rather small hands for a man, with long, nimble fingers that fitted more easily around a spanner than a spear. On impulse, he slid off the thick leather glove, and looked at the hands underneath, pale, calloused, fingers yellowed from years of chain smoking. He was human, so utterly tragically stupidly damnably human. Him, Tifa and Cloud…three humans against a thing that could destroy the whole damned solar system by blinking an eyelid.

Well, that wasn't true. Cloud was no human. Perhaps he had been, long ago, but now he was a part of her, her cells moulded into human shape. He was capable of so many things, things that only a monster could do. Privately, he wondered how long it would be before Cloud learned to fly.

He decided he didn't like to think about Cloud. He was fond of the man, but the insecure, confused weirdo he'd known before everything went wrong. An insecure, confused weirdo who admitted to feeling guilty about killing even lowly monsters, in a nicotine-fuelled confession session they'd had once upon a time. But finding out that he was no human had woken something inside him. Something horrible. Something that didn't make a lot of sense. It was as if he'd decided to play the part of the monster.

He realised that, despite the circulated air in the cabin stopping him from lighting up, he really needed a cigarette.

He felt the submarine halt in its tracks. The weapon seemed to be about thirty metres away from where they were.

So this is it, he thought. I'm gonna die.

He tried to regain the arrogance and pride that he'd carried with him since he was a child, but it paled against that…thing.

Cloud was easing himself out of the chair, fire in his eyes.

The next thing Cid knew was that he was going out of the airlock and the salt water and pressure was stinging his eyes and all he could see was the rolling blueness of the waves rolling a good twenty metres above his head.

* * *

It was lucky he was a strong swimmer, because fighting and swimming at the same time was difficult. It was stupidly difficult. It was even stupider since Cloud had given Yuffie – _Yuffie! - _command of the big guns. There was no chance any of them would be able to deal any useful damage to the creature – they just had to keep it busy until Yuffie could launch the torpedoes.

The _Shinra Barracuda_ model of submarine carried fifty light torpedoes and twenty heavy torpedoes, and that was assuming the _9_ was full of torpedoes when they'd hijacked it, which seemed unlikely as it was being used for transport at the time. If Yuffie ran out of ammo, the others would have to resort to ramming attacks – even though the _9_ was designed for stealth and speed rather than defence.

Their only hope was to defeat Weapon before that happened.

It was very impressive in person, coloured a brilliant emerald green with a dark, congealed-blood materia heart. Its absolute enormity made it unstoppable, unmatchable, invincible.

But why was he thinking like that?

He had to live. He had to live to kill Sephiroth. He was going to save the world, and that made him feel good.

Wait until Shera finds that one out.

The materia seemed to be working, as he hadn't felt any desire to breathe. He would breathe out, though, in a stream of little silver bubbles that rose surfaceward. And apart from that and his spear he was without any secret, any ace in the hole. He didn't even have any materia, dammit. He'd left them all on the sub, dammit.

His cigarettes were still in his jacket and were getting soaked through.

Dammit.

He wished wholeheartedly that he was a monster too – like Cloud, a fast, streamlined, powerful swimmer, whose sword flashed like a mad silver fish as he darted inwards and outwards, towards and away from the Green Weapon. He'd always had an oddly graceful way of fighting, but underwater it was almost breathtaking.

Except there wasn't any air to breathe.

He swam as fast as he could towards the Green Weapon's head, trying to ignore the massive pale yellow eyes staring unblinkingly at him from what must have been shoulders, long ago, and thrust the spear desperately into the creature's brilliant, bright carapace.

It wasn't that powerful a weapon. Take a long pole and tie a kitchen knife on the end and hey fricking presto you have a pike. He hated using it. He hated the fact that he hadn't had the foresight to take one of his experimental missile launchers with him instead. He understood machines – he knew how they all fitted together. So why had he decided to play the dragoon and use a spear instead? When he'd shown Cloud – the good Cloud, the noble Cloud, the weird yet heroic Cloud that he liked – the makeshift weapon he'd laughed and offered to buy him a gun.

At the time, his ego was too bruised to take him up on his offer. If Cloud was going to laugh, he had to prove him wrong.

If only he wasn't so antisocial and so arrogant and _oh gods I really need a cigarette_ and…

The pike penetrated the Green Weapon, but it was hard to remove as the materia-flesh began to close up around it. He pressed his feet against the creature's massive shoulder and pulled hard, twisting the spear slightly, wishing there was air that he could swear into down here.

It came out, awash with golden materia-blood which curled up towards the surface like cigarette smoke _god I need a smoke_ and suddenly it didn't feel that invincible.

It could be cut and hurt and wounded. He could cut it and hurt it and wound it. Hope exploded in his chest, warm and brighter gold than the Green Weapon's blood. He had a chance.

When the submarine blasted past in a wide, wonky arc, and launched a volley of torpedoes at the Green Weapon, he knew they were winning. The water around them turned thick and gold – Cloud's sword, swung round, cut wild swathes of materia-blood into the water.

Why the hell had he been worrying so much? The thing hadn't even tried to fight back yet. Even Tifa, using a harpoon gun that she'd never tried using before in her life, was doing damage to the eerily-beautiful green monster.

The yellow eyes met his and he froze.

The first thing he noticed was that the Green Weapon's materia-heart was glowing ever brighter in the cold sea, and the water around him began to tingle with electricity. If he was on land he knew his hair would be rising with static right now.

All too soon he realised that the Weapon was striking back.

He swam for it, glancing over his shoulder with great cowardice every now and again, noticing how impossibly bright the materia in Cloud's sword and Tifa's gun was glowing. Something was wrong, and he knew it. He tried to shout, but the water stole his words from him and turned them into a stream of silver bubbles, like stars.

And then it happened. The white-hot energy that the materia gleamed with was suddenly discharged into Cloud and Tifa's bodies in a spray of bubbles and dark red blood. He could hear them scream, even though he couldn't. He watched Cloud's heavy body sink down towards the sea floor in slow motion, watched a plume of bloodsmoke trailing behind Tifa, her eyes shining out oddly vacantly through the clear water, her hair streaming out behind her, already becoming pearls and seaweed. It reminded him of a poem he'd heard as a child about a king drowning undersea and suffering a sea-change or something like that. He swam after her, letting go of his spear.

He hadn't been hurt. He'd left his materia on the sub.

Lady Freaking Luck had chosen this moment to hold his hand, all right.


End file.
